Blog Posting No. 100: What Happened So Far On the Visae Patentes IP Blog

The occurrence of this blog in the IP blogoshere wasn't quite as dramatic as the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull in spring this year. However, for me personally it was a rather big step to integrate more or less regular blogging into my daily rountine, so that I hope that some readers could/can gain some value from my posts. If I can trust my statistics tools, I have had about 9.500 visitors so far, mainly form the United States (20,9%), Germany (19,0%), United Kingdom (7,6%) Japan (7,3%) and Holland (6,4%). In my 100th posting it is certainly high time to send my Big Thanks to all of you for following my postings in the past eleven months! My very first blog posting was launched on 18 January 2010 more as a preliminary test than as a start of a regular blogging carrier. Since then I - surprisingly - managed to post 8 to 10 pieces per month, which I consider the absolute maximum imaginable posting rate besides my main "jobs" as patent attorney in my Munich based patent law firm k/s/n/h and as a husband and father of two. As it is explained on the blog's main page, the name "Visae Patentes" is derived from a medieval Latin root whose meaning slowly transformed from an official term for a "privilege issued in writing" (e.g. a patent) to a rather colloquial expression of getting up to nonsense, doing silly things, or messing about something. Of course, I am not saying that patents are nonsense - the name is rather meant to provoke some cognition to achieve "distinctiveness" -, but there certainly exists a fine line between useful patent regimes that really foster technical progress and other regimes that are less useful in this regard. Many smart people (and also some less smart but more dogmatic fellows) assume that this fine line is constantly crossed by so called "software patents", since, so they say, software almost always relates to conceptual and mathematical issues (i.e. "abstract ideas" in the Bilski sense) and programming is not about inventions anyway, which is why software-implemented inventions should not be patentable at all. While I agree that pure conceptual or mathematical teachings may lie beyond that fine line, it is also clear that there exist software-implemented inventions that apparently must lie at the patentable side of that line since they represent technical improvement in the very sense of that word, e.g. a software-controlled washing machine, car brake system or the like. For many years now, jurisdiction around the world have tried to find appropriate legal definitions and models for that fine line, so called patent-eligibility requirements. While the EPO and Germany follow a "technicalilty" approach, the US has its machine-or-transformation test and no-abstract-idea/Bilski approach, Great Britain follows its Aerotel/Macrossan test, Canada requires a "practical embodiment", Australia a "physical effect" and Japan has a laws-of-nature requirement. In the end, all of theses approaches apper to relate to the same…